Google "Test My Site"

Chiotas · June 12, 2016

Hello guys,

I tested my website with the new Google's Test My Site portal.
If you don't know what I'm talink about, give a try here: https://testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com

The results of my test are great on mobile friendliness, but there are a lot of improvements to do on mobile and desktop speed.

Google suggest some action to improve those two speed issues, and both for mobile and desktop, the most important seems to be this one:

"Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content"

So, in just a sentence, hot to do with my SmugMug website? :dunno

Thank you so much for the support! :lust

My website: www.francescogola.net

Ferguson · June 12, 2016

I tried it twice, once with a custom domain, once with smugmug, just for d-grins:

Custom: 97, 54, 75

Smugmug: 97, 59, 66

I have no idea if the small differences are significant, but I was a bit surprised to find differences. Though I didn't get the detailed report yet, breakfast awaits, but I plan to look to see if it's coding differences or network response time (which is more understandable, though that 66 vs 75 is fairly large for two major players with serious bandwidth).

leftquark · June 12, 2016

It's very easy for sites like this to make claims that if you "eliminate such and such" your score will go up but they don't understand what's actually going on nor do they know that eliminating them will actual improve the score, they're just taking guesses as to what might be slowing things down. In this case, we have to do certain things so that your sites will look great on mobile and for search engines. If we eliminated these, your scores would drop significantly.

Mobile Friendly: 99 (good)
Mobile Speed: 60 (poor)
Desktop Speed: 82 (fair)

I imagine some of this is because we're rendering fairly large images (fullscreen, x2large, etc) on both the desktop and mobile device. With the high resolution screens on mobile devices (often with a DPI factor of 2 or 3) we end up having to deliver high resolution images to your phone, even though the actual dimensions are fairly small. For example: the iPhone6 is 375 × 667px but do its 2x scale factor, we have to deliver images as large (or larger) than 750 × 1334px in order for it to not look pixelated at fullscreen. For a fullscreen background, that means we're delivering X3Large images instead of Large images (almost 4 times the file size at times).

To get around this, a lot of our image loading goes on behind the scenes - we display the first photo as fast as possible, so your viewers have something to see, and while they're looking at it, we send the remaining images. Total page time may be longer due to the high resolution images, but your visitors aren't usually waiting around for images to load (contrary to what your report might say, since they're looking at total page load time, and not the fact that the viewer actually has things to look at while it's loading).

Hikin' Mike · June 18, 2016

I tried it on my WordPress site and SM site...

WP: 100, 70, 88

SM: 100, 64, 85

Teetime · June 20, 2016

I tested my SM site:

100, 60, 80

I then tested my blogger site (which is owned by Google):

99, 72, 62

EDIT: And finally, I tested a competitor's website that consistently finishes at the top of the SERP:

94, 55, 67

Conclusion - SEO is complicated.

Marc Rochkind · July 16, 2016

Very useful... thanks! I got a 100/100 for mobile friendliness, which they call "good". I wonder what you have to do to get "very good" or "excellent"? ;-)

Kurgen · July 17, 2016

The speed test is too vague, too generic. It doesn't take into account the fact that our websites are most likely very photo-heavy, and thus, don't behave like more mainstream, lower bandwidth-dependent sites.

leftquark · July 19, 2016

We have some updates coming that will help on most smart phones: we've been serving overly large photos on retina mobile devices and will be scaling back to serve only the maximum size we need to make the photos look great. This should make the pages load faster, use less wireless data, and be better for bandwidth!

Google "Test My Site"

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